Custom MIDI Grid Controller

My friends know I LOVE EDM!!! In college I met another computer engineer named Austin Lynch who pursued music and music production as a hobby. In April I heard about the Freetail Hackers Music Hackathon, a golden opportunity to try our hand at music hardware. I assembled a team that included Sikender Ashraf, Nicholas Dao, Austin Lynch, Kevin Shim, and myself. We completed the project, but not in time for judging.

After agreeing on the Midi Grid as our project, we had to figure out the design we were going to use. We employed the Launchpad / Sequencer With MIDI Output tutorial by MRecord from Instructables for the most part, although our approach to the circuitry was different. We did use button multiplexing; however, we didn't use a driver.

Going into the Hackathon, our plan was to mill a plate with the holes we needed for the buttons and wires. The designated head of the hardware at the shop didn't show up, so we had to improvise. With the kind help of an upper classman, we laser cut a perforated board from wood and used that as the base of our circuitry.

I will NEVER do that again.

Corks in the wood as well as inexperience with some of the laser cutter software led to many failed attempts and wasted hours. On top of that, the cut of wood we used was relatively thick compared to a plastic perf-board. In the end we broke many components and wires trying to soldier the thing.

The Arduino Mega was our microcontroller of choice. This made making the device software driver simple. The Mega converted the input button presses to MIDI data in a way tht Ableton Live could understand/use. Basically it acted as middleware so that the music producer could focus on mapping buttons without worry.

The finished device is exactly what you would expect it to be: easy to use and fun to play with. We used rotating RGB LEDs to reduce the number of pins and wires we had to deal with. Hitting keys produces a disco light effect emitting from the pressed buttons which add to the wow factor. Although a disco MIDI grid is cool, the best part (in my opinion) was the device ran well under $100. To be honest, I'm just glad we finished before finals XD